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Monday
As many, including Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, predicted, the Department of Justice failed to release the full Epstein files on Friday, despite Congress’s order. Instead we have a partial document, heavily redacted and selectively edited.
Of those whose names have been released, I’m struck by how many claim that they were ignorant of Epstein’s pedophilia. It’s not like he hid his cravings, calling his private jet “The Lolita Express” and hosting sex parties on board with underage teenage girls. As Donald Trump himself said at one point,
I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.
There are even a couple of photos—this according to blogger Greg Olear, who has been looking through those photos have been released—of the opening lines of Nabokov’s novel written out on a young woman’s body (her feet, back, and an arm). I haven’t seen the photos but here’s how Humbert Humbert’s narration begins:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
The novel is narrated by a smooth-talking pedophile who marries a woman to get at her 12-year-old daughter and then, when the mother fortuitously dies (before she can expose him), uses his stepfather status to sexually abuse the girl. The scandal of the novel is that Humbert gets to tell the tale himself in a bid for the reader’s sympathy. We are invited to adopt a monster’s perspective and some readers do.
This has been a complaint leveled at novels from the very beginning. Our natural inclination is to identify with the protagonist, no matter how abhorrent, which is one reason why early novels like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (about a thief) and Roxanna (about a prostitute) had to be sold under the counter. Lolita has proved controversial over the years in large part because of how Humbert seduces the reader with his cosmopolitan flair and his facility with language. What I’m wondering is whether Epstein, even as he rode around in the Lolita Express, pulled off the same trick.
Now, if one pays close attention to Lolita, one realizes that Nabokov undercuts him time and again. As Olear observes, because of the author’s genius “we are able to see that this guy is nuts and he’s horrifying and that what he sees is not what’s actually true.” Olear even points out that Humbert’s (fictional) editor warns us that he is not to be trusted. The man’s description applies to Epstein as well:
No doubt he is horrible. He is abject. He is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery, perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman.
In short, reading carefully—both the novel and Epstein—reveals the dark truth. Lolita, one could say, trains us to recognize pedophiles.
Two critical observations about Lolita stand out to me. One is scholar Lionel Trilling observing that the book attempts to makes us complicitous in its monstrous behavior:
[W]e find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.
Then there is Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, who said her students identified with Lolita and saw in Humbert the mullahs who were erasing their personhood and turning them into objects. Nafisi writes,
Lolita is given to us as Humbert’s creature … To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own … Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses.
Thanks to the courageous women who are now speaking out about their Epstein experience, we are finally getting those glimpses. We will learn even more if the Justice Department fully releases the files.
